Melting the Snow on Hester Street

‘No,’ Eleanor said quickly. ‘Thank you, Mrs Monroe. It doesn’t matter at all. I’ll find him later.’

She hung up. Took a deep breath, and another. It was nothing new. There was nothing new about it.

After that, she didn’t allow herself to wallow. Eleanor never allowed herself to wallow. She simply dressed and packed. She fetched one of her personalized cards from the drawer of her dressing table, and beneath their curly, gold-embossed initials, entwined, wrote her husband a note:

Darling,

I called the studio, but you were busy, busy! Mrs Monroe offered to go in search, but then she said you might have gone out of town on reconnaissance and really I couldn’t wait. Darling, you remember I showed you a letter once from a little detective I had found in Reno and you thought so little of him? Well, I never mentioned him again because I knew it made you so cross but I went ahead and employed him, because … well, of course you know why. Matz, he died. But now his son has written, and I think he has somethingimportant to tell us. He has asked me to Reno to meet with him and of course I must go. I will call you the first moment I have any news.

Your ever-loving wife,

Eleana

She placed it, carefully, at a jaunty angle on her sunny dressing table, paused, and looked at it again. She looked at it for a long time.

When had she last called him Matz? Seeing it written, and her own, Eleana, beneath it, took her by surprise; brought a stab of pain. She had no idea what had possessed her to use their old names. She snatched up the card and ripped it into pieces. She opened the drawer, took out a fresh card, and started again:

M,

I shall be gone for a few days. I think it’s about time we talked, don’t you?

E

She placed the card, carefully, at a less jaunty angle, on the same sunny dressing table, pinned beneath the heavy gold-framed photograph. She picked up her bag, leaving the rest of her post unopened, the script unread, the forgotten jewel, more precious than last year’s, half hidden beneath a cold, dry piece of toast. And then she left the house before she had a chance to think better of it.

6

‘It’s probably gonna sound funny,’ Blanche Williams was saying, a couple of miles down the road. ‘But I have respect for your wife. I have a lot of respect for her. I thought she looked just about as classy and dazzling as a girl can look in that emerald-green get-up last night.’

He had his head between her legs; his tongue inside her sweet, juicy knish … Half a second ago she’d been purring like a pussycat … Dammit. He put a soothing hand on her stomach, gave her ass a little pinch, and stayed right where he was, just as if she hadn’t spoken.

But once Blanche started on a topic, as by now he knew quite well, there was rarely any chance of her dropping it.

‘She’s beautiful,’ Miss Williams continued, ‘she’s mysterious. God knows, she’s a terrific actress … at least, that is, when she wants to be. And you know with all that, I got to ask myself –’ Blanche hoiked herself onto an elbow to look at him – ‘what in hell you’re doing spending your time with a Little Miss Nobody like me?’

He paused. Stopped. Lifted his head. ‘What’s that, sweetie?’ he muttered.

‘I was just saying …’

Max gave up. He stretched across her naked body for the cigarette pack, lit up two, one for each of them, and lay back on the pillow beside her. ‘… I heard what you were saying, baby.’

‘So?’

Max exhaled, disguising a small, dull sigh inside the smoke: ‘So … what?’

‘So … what are you kicking around with a dozy little broad like me for? When you have a class act like Eleanor Beecham waiting for you back home?’

It took a beat before Max replied. Blanche noticed it, even if he didn’t. ‘Baby,’ he said, ‘because I love “kicking around” with you.’ He laughed. ‘And you’re hardly “a dozy little broad”.’

‘But you never talk about her.’

‘Why would I talk about her?’

‘Because she’s your wife. Is why. And because I am your lover. And everybody knows you two adore each other. And because of the way you kissed her last night. And the way you two looked at each other. And because I am just jealous as hell. Is why.’

Max smiled into her pretty, honest eyes, and dropped a kiss on her pretty shoulder. ‘You have nothing to be jealous about, sweetheart. If you did, I wouldn’t be here.’ His hand returned to her slim stomach, and slowly continued on down. She paused – before reluctantly pushing his hand away. ‘You’re not being fair, Max.’

‘Baby,’ he murmured, not giving up just yet; nuzzling her neck, returning his hand. ‘… And nor are you … what are you fretting for, hmm? You have nothing to fret about, baby … just enjoy yourself …’

She pushed him away again, with more conviction this time, and climbed out of the bed. They’d spent the whole morning enjoying themselves in her bed already. And much as she would have loved to spend the rest of the day there with him, she needed to check in with the office. She had an interview with a new girl over at Columbia at three o’clock – some soon-to-be-big, Little-Miss-Girl-from-Nowhere, with a freshly invented life story to plug – and the Columbia people were keen for Blanche to do the big write-up. Added to which, she was determined that she and Max didn’t part company without having had at least a semblance of a conversation. In bed, Blanche was more than happy to be treated like a dirty little sex machine. Actually it suited her just fine. But out of bed, there had to be something between them to make her feel like a decent human being again.

Blanche was ten years Max’s junior, easily young enough to produce a litter of children if she wanted them, except she was adamant she didn’t. Her independence, so hard fought and still so fresh, was something she could never envisage surrendering. Blanche was a woman of her time, and proud of it. She paid her own way, made her own path – lived alone in her snazzy little apartment (very ‘moderne’ she told her disapproving family, back home in Oregon), in a spanking new apartment block just above Sunset. She and Max had been lovers, on and off – with two short breaks during which Blanche attempted to wean herself from him – since she interviewed him for the magazine five years ago.

7

Nineteen twenty-four, it would have been. Or thereabouts. Almost a year after he joined Silverman. They met for lunch at Musso & Frank – without the marketing guys, because Max insisted on it. He was supposed to be telling her about his first picture since being lured away from Lionsfiel. The film was called The Girl Who Couldn’t Smile, and it went on to gross more for Silverman Pictures than any movie they had yet released. But Blanche had been instructed by her editor not to ‘go too heavy’ on the new movie angle, since readers were unlikely to be terribly interested, and instead to concentrate her questions on the Big Split.

Max’s move from Lionsfiel to Silverman had astonished the Movie Colony because he left behind not only his long-time producer and friend, Butch Menken; but – even more intriguing, at least to Blanche’s readers – his movie-star wife. Until then the three of them – producer, director and star – had made not a single film without each other. They were a winning formula – no one doubted that, and everyone had always assumed the trio was inseparable.

So Max had talked to Miss Blanche Williams about the Split that Rocked Hollywood (as her magazine later entitled the article). And with or without the marketing men to prompt him, he had stuck to the official version of events. Which, with a few vital omissions, wasn’t, after all, entirely divorced from the truth. And Blanche was a good listener – an accomplished interviewer. Over steaming, unwanted bowls of the famous Musso & Frank pasta, and a bottle of Château Margaux, provided by Max and poured by him, under the table, into Musso tea mugs, Max talked with disarming warmth and eloquence about his sadness not to be working with his beloved wife any longer. He and Eleanor had agreed that the moment had come for them both to spread their wings … It was time for Eleanor to experiment with different directors and, for Max, with different actors and actresses. He didn’t mention Butch Menken.

‘What about Butch?’

‘Butch Menken?’ Max waved a dismissive arm. ‘Butch is a good guy.’

‘That’s what I heard.’

‘But creatively, we had taken it as far as we could. Butch is good guy. I have a lot of respect for him.’

‘So there was no fall-out?’

‘There was no fall-out. Whatsoever. Butch and I remain the greatest of pals.’

‘So the rumours …’

He cocked a smile, looked his little interrogator dead in the eye. ‘What rumours would they be?’

She blushed, which didn’t happen often. His gaze was disconcertingly direct. Made her want to wriggle in her chair. He was, she reflected as she recovered herself, without doubt the most attractive man she had ever had lunch with.

‘Well, the rumours that … Heck, Mr Beecham, I’m sure you know what people are saying! That you dumped him. Despite being the oldest and best of friends. Because he just wasn’t up to it … You had creatively outgrown him.’

‘Ahh. Those rumours.’ He smiled. She would never have known it, never have guessed. Under the table, he refilled her mug with red wine, and felt his heart begin to beat again. ‘Butch is a fine producer,’ he said, making a show of picking his words with great care. ‘It goes without saying. Butch is a good producer. But as filmmakers we were travelling different paths. That’s all. We wanted to make different kinds of movies. And consequently we were finding it difficult to agree …’

In any case, Max explained, redirecting the conversation, the offer to join Silverman Pictures was too exciting to turn down. Joel Silverman had promised him more autonomy, bigger budgets, freedom to choose his own scripts. ‘And I have to tell you, Joel Silverman has kept to his word! Ha! And it’s not so often you hear that said, is it? Not in this town!’

‘But why didn’t Mrs Beecham come with you?’ Blanche persisted. ‘She’s such a great actress. Didn’t you want her to come with you? Or was it her? Maybe she didn’t want to come?’

Max shrugged. ‘Of course I wanted her to come. Of course …